1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to systems and methods for web analytics. More particularly, the present invention is related to display of website visitation information and statistics, and specifically to a report that shows websites that were traversed by a user and simulate the visitation experience.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web analytics refers to the analysis of data created by website usage. For instance, web analytics can be used to mine visitor traffic data. A variety of visitor traffic data is measured such as what browser is being used, what links on a given web page were selected, whether a product was purchase, etc. There are number of web analytics tools presently available such as Site Catalyst version 11 from Omniture of Orem, Utah. These tools are able to capture data on website usage, and responsive to a user's request display a variety of different metrics on website usage such fallout/conversion, A/B testing, etc.
It is useful for website operators to be able to discern patterns of visitation to their websites. Website operators, advertisers, and other parties are interested in finding out which web pages within their websites tend to be visited more or less frequently than others. Such information has many uses, including for example: identifying problem areas in a website, pages that tend to lose visitors to other websites, traffic flow for advertising and server load purposes, and the like.
Of particular use are statistics or information describing the visitation path flow that visitors tend to follow. Such statistics include for example, information describing where the visitors tend to enter the site, what pages do they tend to visit first, what pages tend to be visited just after or before other pages, and the like.
Existing web analytics software generally provides some statistics as to site visitation path flow. In general, such techniques include presentation of static reports describing the percentage of visitors that follow particular path flows. For the most part the information presented is accumulation of statistics. One difficulty with such statistical information, is that there is presently not a way to simulate or replicate the experience the visitor had in traversing different web pages.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for presenting a simulation of the user's experience in viewing websites.